Book excerpt: New edition, prepared with a bio-bibliographical account of Hehn and a survay of the research into Indo-European prehistory by James P. Mallory. It was Hehn who for the first time combined the tools of comparative linguistics and the direct historical approach in order to discover the origins of domesticated animals and cultivated plants in the ancient world, tracing their diffusion from one culture to another. Hehn abandoned his contemporaries'often idealized and nationalistic image of the ancient Indo-Europeans, seeking instead to reconstruct early Indo-European society in agreement with the ethnological research of his day.